Last autumn, I dyed some Lopi icelandic wool singles skeins with indigo as a test before dying the wool for the kaftan fabric. I was excited by the way the yarn turned out; the color was rich and saturated. I knew instantly what I wanted to make from them – naalbind socks. Because I had a lot of other projects going on at the time, I reluctantly set the yarn aside for another time. I…
Now that I know the sett of the kaftan cloth based on my sampling, in order to start winding the warp and to figure out how much dyed yarn the project will require, its time to recalculate my yarn needs. To see my previous estimate, go here. I’ve chosen wool as the fiber for the Kaftan fabric, and the yarn I have selected is a 20/2 lace weight worsted wool made by Jaggerspun called Maine…
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The first step in preparing the yarn for dyeing is to wind it off the cones and into skeins. Dear friends gifted me with a skein winder making this whole process much easier. I divided the one pound cones into four skeins of roughly the same size. This was purely guess factor on my part. I could have gotten much closer to 1/4 pound skeins if I had set the cone on a scale. Don’t…
Sunday was a good day. Started with checking the indigo dye vat and it’s cooking along nicely. Its already developed that bronzy indigo “bloom” on top. That is from the previous indigo in the vat. The new batch I put in has a few days to go. Lovely isn’t it? Around noon, my friends Dawn and Merrit came over for afternoon of felting. Dawn and I had a really good in depth discussion about…
